Psychological Disorders and Therapies: DSM-5, Mood, Anxiety, Schizophrenia, and Treatment Methods

Psychological Disorder

A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

A psychological disorder marked by the appearance by age 7 of one or more of three key symptoms: extreme inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity.

Medial Model

The concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and, in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital.

DSM-5

The American psychiatric association's diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition; a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders.

Anxiety Disorder

Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety.

Generalized anxiety disorder

An anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.

Panic Disorder

An anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations.

Phobia

An anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.

Social Anxiety Disorder

Intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such. (Formally called social phobia).

Agoraphobia

Fear or avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide-open places, where one has felt loss of control and panic.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions).

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feelings, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience.

Posttraumatic growth

Positive psychological changes as a result of struggling with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises.

Mood disorders

Psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes.

Major depressive disorder

A mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or another medical condition, two or more weeks with five or more symptoms, at least one of which must be either (1.) Depressed mood or (2.) Loss of interest or pleasure.

Mania

A mood disorder marked by a hyperactive, wildly optimistic state.

Bipolar disorder

A mood disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania.

Rumination

Compulsive fretting; overthinking about our problems and their causes.

Schizophrenia

A psychological disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished or inappropriate emotional expression.

Psychosis

A psychological disorder in which a person loses contact with reality, experiencing irrational ideas and distorted perception.

Delusions

False beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorder.

Hallucinations

False sensory experience, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.

Somatic symptom disorder

A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.

Conversion disorder

A disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no psychological basis can be found.

Illness anxiety disorder

A disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensation as symptoms of a disease.

Dissociative disorder

Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID)

A rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities.

Anorexia nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly underweight.

Bulimia nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating with purging, excessive exercise, or fasting.

Binge-eating disorder

Significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging or fasting that marks bulimia nervosa.

Personality disorders

Psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.

Antisocial personality disorder

A personality disorder in which a person exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members.

Psychotherapy

Treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Biomedical therapy

Prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person's physiology.

Eclectic approach

An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client's problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.

Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud's therapeutic technique; Freud believed the patient's free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist's interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

Resistance

In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.

Interpretation

In psychoanalysis, the analyst's noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.

Transference

In psychoanalysis, the patient's transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for parents).

Psychodynamic therapy

Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to the unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.

Insight therapies

A variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person's awareness of underlying motives and defenses.

Client-centered therapy

A humanistic theory, developed by Carl Rogers; in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate client's growth.

Active listening

Empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers' client-centered therapy.

Unconditional positive regard

A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Behavior therapy

Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.

Counterconditioning

Behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.

Exposure therapies

Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.

Systematic desensitization

A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant, relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.

Virtual reality exposure therapy

An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to electronic stimulations of their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking.

Aversive conditioning

A type of counterconditioning that associates an unpleasant state (such as nausea) with an unwanted behavior (such as drinking alcohol).

Token economy

An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange the tokens for various privileges or treats.

Cognitive Therapy

Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

Rational-emotive behavior therapy

A confrontational cognitive therapy, developed by Albert Ellis, that vigorously challenges people's illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy

A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

Group therapy

Therapy conducted with groups rather than individuals, permitting therapeutic benefits from group interaction.

Family therapy

Therapy that treats the family as a system. Views an individual's unwanted behaviors as influenced by, or directed at, other family members.

Regression toward the mean

The tendency for extreme or unusual scores to fall back (regress) toward their average.

Meta-analysis

A procedure for statistically combining the results of many different research studies.

Evidence-based practice

Clinical decision making that integrates the best available research with clinical expertise and patient characteristics and preferences.

Therapeutic alliance

A bond of trust and mutual understanding between a therapist and client, who work together constructively to overcome the client's problem.

Resilience

The personal strength that helps most people cope with stress and recover from adversity and even trauma.

Psychopharmacology

The study of the effects of drugs on mind and behavior.

Antipsychotic drugs

Drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other forms of severe thought disorder.

Antianxiety drugs

Drugs used to control anxiety and agitation.

Antidepressant drugs

Drugs used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Electroconvulsive therapy

A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

The application of repeated pulses of magnetic energy to the brain; used to stimulate or suppress brain activity.

Psychosurgery

Surgery that removes or destroys brain tissue in an effort to change behavior.

Lobotomy

A psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients. The procedure cut the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.

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